Team Internet is to take over back-end duties for .co, after agreeing to take less than half as much as GoDaddy was charging.
The London-based company has teamed up on a joint venture, Equipo PuntoCo, with Panama-based registrar CCI REG to sign a 10-year deal with Colombia’s communications ministry, MINTIC.
The handover will put an end to GoDaddy’s 15-year stint as .co’s back end. The TLD was relaunched globally as a .com alternative in 2010 by .CO Internet, which was subsequently acquired by Neustar and then GoDaddy.
It seems Team Internet was willing to price its services much lower than GoDaddy. The company said in a statement that Equipo PuntoCo is getting 8% of gross revenue from .co sales, compared to the 19% GoDaddy was getting and the 93% .CO Internet originally received. The rest goes into the Colombian public purse.
While it’s not the biggest TLD on Team Internet’s servers (that honor goes to .xyz), it’s going to be the second or third largest migration of a single TLD between registry services providers in the history of the DNS.
.co had about 3.2 million domains at the start of the year. Today, Team Internet says it has “more than 3 million”. It’s the same ballpark as .au’s 2018 move from Neustar to Afilias, which was 3.1 million names, but a million shy of this year’s migration of .in from GoDaddy to Tucows.
When it comes to retaining the big ccTLDs, it seems GoDaddy really can’t catch a break.
Radix and Identity Digital also competed for the contract.
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